Bench Painting! (Patreon)

This is the kind of stuff I share with my $5+ patrons, but since I skipped a week of Elephant Town to work on this, thought I'd share it with all of ya. :)

Last week I got busy with some community art stuff, mainly painting a bench. (My town is setting up more outdoor seating to encourage more take-out orders in town.)

I decided to paint a little homage to the well-known tale of some peculiar bones buried beneath Trinity Episcopal Church about 150 years ago. I'll say no more. 

If you enjoy Internet detective work, you'll find it. ;)

Here's my digital mockup:

I was a little nervous about painting. I don't do opaque paint. Some of the acrylics I used were (miraculously still useable) tubes from my college painting class 20 years ago.

I've always preferred the challenge of mixing my own colors, so I picked up some bottles of cheap primary colors, white, black, and an oops-gallon of green latex paint.

Day one: 

I was pretty thrilled I could mix the colors I'd mocked up digitally! Especially that spooky glowy yellow-blue color. (I wanted it to feel yellow-blue rather than green, and I think the contrast with the darker green made it happen.)

Originally I wanted to paint a cool skull on the seat, but opted to paint over it after day one. The whole skeleton would be more recognizable and I wanted people to know what it was.

I would highly recommend NEVER PAINTING STRAIGHT LINES if you can help it. That church gave me hell. The tiny people were fun, though!

Taking photos of what I'm working on and then painting changes on them in Procreate has been... a small miracle.

Here are some closeups!

Finished! 

I painted the outline and bones of the elephant (as well as the moon) with some glow-in-the-dark paint I had from Halloween, which was a COOL-ASS IDEA, but unfortunately VERY difficult to work with! ... probably because it was body paint, not acrylic. So it took DAYS to dry. 

And then the bench was placed somewhere with 24/7 lamps anyway. What're ya gonna do! 

If you live in town and you see the bench - out across from Admiral Analog's - at night, stick your phone's flashlight on it for a few seconds and cover it with your hand! It's a decent effect. :)

I've also been working on a town map for a local small newspaper (The Observer), which has been more work than I'd expected!

My little dabbling in graphic design and painting was fun, but I'm happy to get back to comics. :)